Cyberbotics' Robot Curriculum/What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an interdisciplinary field of study that includes computer science, engineering, philosophy and psychology.

Early in the 17th century, René Descartes envisioned the bodies of animals as complex but reducible machines, thus formulating the mechanistic theory, also known as the 'clockwork paradigm'.

Wilhelm Schickard created the first mechanical digital calculating machine in 1623, followed by machines of Blaise Pascal (1643) and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1671), who also invented the binary system.

In 1931 Kurt Gödel showed that sufficiently powerful consistent formal systems contain true theorems unprovable by any theorem-proving AI that is systematically deriving all possible theorems from the axioms.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Joel Moses demonstrated the power of symbolic reasoning for integration problems in the Macsyma program, the first successful knowledge-based program in mathematics.

Leonard Uhr and Charles Vossler published 'A Pattern Recognition Program That Generates, Evaluates, and Adjusts Its Own Operators' in 1963, which described one of the first machine learning programs that could adaptively acquire and modify features and thereby overcome the limitations of simple perceptrons of Rosenblatt.

Ted Shortliffe demonstrated the power of rule-based systems for knowledge representation and inference in medical diagnosis and therapy in what is sometimes called the first expert system.

In 1995, one of Ernst Dickmanns' robot cars drove more than 1000 miles in traffic at up to 110 mph, tracking and passing other cars (simultaneously Dean Pomerleau of Carnegie Mellon tested a semi-autonomous car with human-controlled throttle and brakes).

Bayesian networks are the focus of this movement, providing links to more rigorous topics in statistics and engineering such as Markov models and Kalman filters, and bridging the divide between GOFAI and New AI.